Bruce Fretts

About as arousing as an icy shower.

Sometimes, typecasting works: Holmes and Bratt settle comfortably into their roles, and the movie proves a competently made, mildly diverting collegiate thriller -- at least until its all-too-predictable ''twist'' ending.

It's usually a good idea to avoid anything billed as ''a fable,'' but The Legend of 1900 offers almost enough merits to warrant an exception

Commits the cardinal sin of too many modern movies: It never gives the audience a clue why any of these people were ever attracted to one another in the first place. [30 May 1997, p. 54]

The only possible reason to see this otherwise average afternoon waster is Sagemiller.

But when the writers run out of ideas, they simply have Farley walk into a lamppost, or cop from old SNL skits.

Aa shockingly chintzy spin-off of Fox's post ''Pokémon'' cartoon hit.

It's like the worst movie Jean-Claude Van Damme never made.

Bouncy animation and catchy songs keep the film from tasting too much like spinach.

The third helping of ''American Pie'' offers little more than crumbs. Half the franchise's core cast (including Mena Suvari, Chris Klein, and Tara Reid) chose to skip the big fat geek wedding.

It doesn't help that most of the jokes (like a rip-off of ''There's Something About Mary'''s dog-in-the-crotch bit) are themselves stolen.

Darkness Falls is like something salvaged from Stephen King's wastebasket.

Leguizamo owns Empire, the first film to capture the live-wire crackle of his one-man stage shows -- He's front and center in nearly every scene, and he holds the screen with a simmering self-assurance.

Paul Newman won his Best Actor Oscar for its 1986 sequel, The Color of Money, but he executed an equally award-worthy turn in Robert Rossen’s jazzy, boozy pool-hall morality play.

Aims for dark farce but ends up playing more like Weekend at Bernie's Part VIII. [25 Apr 1997, p. 50]

Norm Macdonald proves himself to be the new Chevy Chase by following up his ”Weekend Update” stint with Dirty Work, a smug, unfunny feature flop.

Have there ever been two less energetic stars than Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra? Casting this diffident duo in an allegedly romantic comedy proves disastrous; they suck the air out of virtually every scene.

You know all that artistic cred Adam Sandler built up with his acclaimed work in ''Punch-Drunk Love''? Well, he flushes it down the crapper with Adam Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights -- the most ill-conceived animated comedy since the 1991 dog ''Rover Dangerfield.''

Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Kaos was apparently aiming for a coolly stylized, straight-faced take on ''Spy vs. Spy.'' As Maxwell Smart used to say, ''Missed it by that much.''

This cinematic stiff should have stayed buried.

When Seagal's undercover FBI agent Sascha Petrosevitch waddles into the big house wearing a do-rag and a billowing blue jumpsuit, it's the funniest jailhouse-flick scene since Gene Wilder's white-boy strut in ''Stir Crazy.''

While it's rarely scary, the film is often gory.

Carpenter's brutally efficient exercise in tension and release.

The only pleasure to be derived from the resulting carnage comes from the Rube Goldbergesque chain reactions that precede each fatality.

Wild Bill succeeds as a character study of a man whose idiosyncratic code of justice eventually catches up with him. Bridges’ performance is a masterstroke of squinty-eyed bitterness, and he gets colorful support from Ellen Barkin (as kitten with a whip Calamity Jane) and John Hurt (as a dissipated British dandy).

A distasteful zeitgeist cocktail tracking the booze-fueled sexcapades of eight repellent L.A. singles.

With his tousled mane and wispy facial hair, Asian pop star/ Prada model Kaneshiro suggests a Japanese Johnny Depp, but even his charisma can't carry Returner through its interminable longueurs. Blame it on Yamazaki.